Podcast: Why Ireland’s Great Famine matters

It is impossible to understand the history of modern India without taking into account mass famines under British rule. The same thing can be said about another former British possession: Ireland. Precisely 180 years ago, Ireland stared into the abyss of the Great Famine, where at least one million people died and a further million emigrated. Astonishingly, the population of Ireland today remains lower than it was on the eve of the famine.

This cataclysmic event is the topic of Padraic X. Scanlan’s new book, Rot: A History of the Irish Famine. In this episode of Past Imperfect, Scanlan explains how the famine was “disconcertingly modern.”

Yes, it began with the introduction of P. infestans, a fungus which devastated potato crops. But the fungus was so deadly because of the nature of Ireland’s essentially colonial economy – and because of British famine policies which were shaped by colonialist mentalities and a rigorous adherence to free market principles.

The market would ultimately resolve the famine, British administrators assured themselves. They even believed that the workings of the market during the famine might positively reshape Irish society, which they saw as a foil to Britons’ industry and work ethic. As any historian of India knows, such attitudes were chillingly similar to those evident amongst certain Raj-era colonial administrators.

Scanlan, however, casts a wider net: he sees the forces of global capitalism at work in mass starvation in Ireland. Irish poverty was the product of the grinding extraction of rent from poor tenants, monoculture, and the whims of the global economy. Even during the worst moments of the famine, Ireland continued to export agricultural goods.

The British authorities, meanwhile, believed that famine assistance needed to have strict conditions and clear costs: hungry recipients needed to “earn” it so as not to create the nineteenth-century equivalent of welfare dependency. In many ways, Scanlan argues, famine-era Ireland “more closely resembles capitalism’s future than its past”.

The famine, therefore, was manmade. It was so deadly because the vast bulk of rural Irish already lived on the cusp of starvation, mired in debt and experiencing declining quality of life.

To Britons of the time, Ireland’s predicament seemed to make little sense. Were Irish immune to the laws of political economy? Were they simply lazy and unmotivated? Stereotypes and downright racist ideas about the Irish, honed during centuries of English occupation, guided officials in London as they charted a policy of relief.

In addition to free-market orthodoxy, the British government preached austerity. This had tragicomic results. Authorities established a network of workhouses to employ famine victims. Due to an overriding worry about affecting market forces, workhouse inmates were made to do “strenuous but purposeless” work, such as breaking stones. In one instance, authorities actually reprimanded workhouses for introducing farming. Growing food for starving inmates, confoundingly, did not mesh well with the perceived laws of the economy.

Meant to be an option of last resort, workhouses soon supported millions of people. Costs, meanwhile, spiraled out of control. Workhouses were awful, inhumane places – not too different from many famine relief camps in late-nineteenth-century India. But they also drained the exchequer and were sites of fraud, embezzlement, and a range of petty and violent crimes. Lastly, they caused lasting material harm to poor Irish: many of them were forced to give up their land as a prerequisite for entering workhouses.

As a consequence, Ireland became a “hellscape” by 1847. Starvation and disease dissolved familial and social bonds. As large landlords came under financial pressure, they simply evicted poor tenants, burning down or deroofing their dwellings to ensure that they would not return. Violent crime swept through the country as bands of starving people attacked food convoys, relief infrastructure, and carts and barges carrying agricultural goods for export.

Amid the chaos, the British prime minister, John Russell, took an incredible step: he effectively declared the famine over, passing on the cost of relief to the Irish.

While the famine elicited a wave of sympathy across the world, Scanlan notes that this soon curdled into indifference and outright hostility. When, in 1848, members of a special committee of the House of Lords asked a witness about remedies for endemic Irish poverty, they received a pithy reply: “death or emigration.”

In this episode, Scanlan concludes that Irish poverty was not the “poverty of people who didn’t understand the market” – rather, poor Irish were “trapped in a negative feedback loop within the free market”. Much the same could be said about India during the nineteenth century.

The past few years, furthermore, have demonstrated that mass famine is not some historical relic: it has stalked places like Yemen, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Gaza. Nearly two centuries on, the Irish Famine continues to impart an important lesson. Famines are not, as Scanlan tells us, simply “acts of God.” They are the results of deliberate political and economic decisions.

Dinyar Patel is an associate professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.

Past Imperfect is sponsored and produced by the Centre for Wisdom and Leadership at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.